


[Youth]

by Eicinic



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Existentialism, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-03
Updated: 2016-05-03
Packaged: 2018-06-06 04:16:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6737914
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eicinic/pseuds/Eicinic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[This is the only way they know to live]</p>
            </blockquote>





	[Youth]

[Cuanto se querían el mundo.]

 

 

 

 

> _This world is not your frame,_ he wrote, once, _you belong to a bigger place._
> 
> _(a bigger place than me,_ is what he wanted to say _, but never did)._  
> 

They all die in the end. Never a consolation, only a whisper, skin to skin, muffled in the corners of the bones drawing grooves on the flesh; he kissed them by memory often, eyes closed and hopes hanging in the corner of his mouth, that one he used to lick his way into him like there wasn’t a time in which neither of them knew how to do it. Some habits stick hard to the bones, said Kenma, you can’t scrape them out.

How true can it be to find himself three months later, still lying down on the bed as if waiting for another body to keep him company. They slept over two thick mattresses, heads above the windowsill, eyes often smitten with the sky, the night lights and the city noises. Getting high back then was just a matter of kissing the smoke directly from the other’s lungs, as if breathing was a countdown to extinction: holding back the breath in every drag.

 _There is another perspective from here,_ Tetsurou scratched on the wall, next to where his left shoulder used to be pressed hard against the cold when Kenma descended on him, swallowing the space and the silence with every suck.

 _Youth,_ they learnt, wasn’t a matter of following the expectations the world had on them, but of discovering there was a way of giving them the cold shoulder and _considering_ what was next. The edge of danger in the face of an unstable future was reason enough to keep living. Kenma said _this won’t end,_ signing like that the pillars of their religion, the one they built in the bed and dragged after their hearts three years and fifty four days later, when Tetsurou rubbed at his neck looked down and muttered _I don’t think we can keep going like this,_ which was another way of saying _I don’t know how to live with you anymore._

The walls of their shared room are empty. They have always been like this, just occasional scrapes and a lot of images embedded on the walls of the times when Kenma let the lights on because his eyes have never felt as awake: looking at Tetsurou’s flushed face when his voice broke at the end of a _Kenma_ that sounded like a prayer, back arching off the mattress and fingers desperately looking for an anchor neither of them knew their bed would become.

Their bed (what they carry inside: _their cemetery._ )

His mouth always say sorry, but his body never does. They keep orbiting each other like they have forgotten what it felt to be lost, always running into the other in the streets, at the store, at the hall of the building they don’t share anymore, yet there lingers the mute question _do you wanna crash in my room tonight_

and the not so silent _yes please_

They really don’t know how to live with entire pieces, so they remain content with what’s left and broken; what they left, and broke. Kenma’s body is the place where he comes back and even though he can’t stay, he adores and devotes, sometimes forgetting but never forgiving, those two are concepts they started to understand once they were apart and their souls felt too light to keep living.

They used to look at the sky, but never wanted to leave. The ground feels familiar, dirty, maybe not what they deserve but maybe what they got. Loving is complicated, Kenma said once, head thrown back, throat exposed and hands working himself to _ungravity_ as Tetsurou massaged his scalp, shoulders and watched. _Loving_ is a language whose beginning they don’t remember anymore but are always reinventing, in this bed that felt like home and like their grave.

 _Our bones will be back to the ground,_ Tetsurou wrote one morning, Kenma sleeping naked by his side. Ground is a safe place. Ground is what _they know._ It might not be good but it’s what they choose. Still, they didn’t kiss outside the room. Their bed was the sanctuary in which they buried their reality. Outside, Tetsurou was Tetsurou and Kenma was Kenma, childhood friends sharing an apartment never experiencing how the moans of the other sounded like. Drifting along the responsibility of the choices they didn’t make just yet, early twenties and already knowing what life had to offer, still giving up on dreams as much as chasing after them was the bread of their day to day. _Youth_ was for them a matter of finding, and losing time, as much as _life_ felt hopeful, and hopeless.

 _This is not what love is supposed to be like,_ Tetsurou said aloud once, Kenma’s hand wandering along the crevices of his spine. He didn’t add anything else, but Kenma could hear the _love is not supposed to be about conforming to what you already have_ that never followed. What little did Kenma know, anyway, but the way Tetsurou contorted when his tongue was inside him and asked, voice low and raspy _more._

 _Love is supposed to leave wounds,_ is what he replied at the end because this was more or less what he supposed he’d feel if he came back to an empty house, but still heard Tetsurou’s voice greeting him. _Absence._

Some wounds stay was the thing Tetsurou never wrote on their wall, probably because he was already gone by the time Kenma sat on the kitchen, lost his gaze on the table, let the time drift away from him and understood he was bleeding inside and it couldn’t be stopped. His mind vaguely wandered into reality then, just briefly, just sometimes, just a moment among the fog in which he silently questioned _isn’t this what depression feels like?,_ and then forgot about it, as he forgot about all the years he didn’t spend by Tetsurou’s side.

A gap so big it couldn’t be closed with the bare hands. So big it wasn’t worth the try.

A clouded mind filled with squalls finds anchor in the emptiness.

 _Come back to me,_ Kenma wrote under all the other words of Tetsurou,

 

> _I won't die like this._ Amen. 

Let’s go away, he thinks, like he can rewrite his existence, let’s go away, let’s rebel, let’s be what is not expected of us, let’s forget how not having a place to come back to feels like. Then, smaller: let’s understand the meaning of _wild._

Yet he doesn’t have to because he _knows,_ he knows wild is Tetsurou’s hair, is his sharp, heavy gaze on him, the promises neither of them kept but _lived._

Maybe the feeling of incompleteness is the only thing he really understands about existence. There is always a hole in him, with or without Tetsurou. Maybe that is what his friend called _I don’t think we can keep going like this._ Wasn’t the universe like that? Everything orbits to its end, almost defying the reason it exists: it exists to be consumed.

 _Consumed_ is how Tetsurou used to feel under Kenma’s weight, hearing him breathe and hearing him cry, his heart pounding arrhythmically inside his ribs, making him think it only works when he is thrusting hard into his friend’s body, usually forgetting pain is the double face of pleasure- the only face he sees when he wakes up is Kenma’s: cold, gold eyes of night and body lacking in meals because it already feels full _enough_. He liked to wake up like this every night.

A titubation is all it takes to say goodbye after what they called eternity. They don’t meet the other’s eyes because their mouths could follow, there is a lot of silence, and a lot of underlying _hurt_ as if they were being ripped apart and exposed even though they have never wore more layers than then. Tetsurou says I’ll miss you and Kenma hums because it’s true, and because he will miss him too, some things are as simple as this. As complicated as this. Just like them: a life of contradictions.

Their early twenties become their early thirties and they are still apart, but still orbiting. It’s just the sun, that is all the time in the middle of their field of vision. _Blinding_ because if something Kenma knows now is that love _blinds_ and _awakes._

They never fell in love.

But they always loved.

They are both strays is what those years apart, in silence, are saying. They belong to the city, to the night, to the world, but they don’t really belong with each other. _Together_ is a word they have forgotten, the routine of waking up and walking through life like the years don’t matter, like there is something else that is supposed to come like this can’t be _everything._ Happiness isn’t supposed to be like this, either, but what is it supposed to feel like if they have never experienced it? Belonging to the ground leaves them the hope of looking up, but this is okay, too. Being hopesick and homesick is okay too.

Maybe this is the only thing they know.

Still, an encounter after so long, not really welcomed but not unwelcomed either, a following _you look like you’re doing okay,_ a quiet, _familiar_ smile and Kenma’s voice resonating in his head like it was yesterday when they were having sex, or rather, _building love_ in that bed with two mattresses above the windowsill: _some habits stick hard to the bones._

 

**Author's Note:**

> // struggles to write in english  
> Thanks to my angel Pixie for always having the patience to deal with my lack of knowledge ♥ ♥ (๑•̀ㅂ•́)و


End file.
